Research Area: Cancer Biology

Location: Beijing, China

Hong Wu, Ph.D., received her medical education from Beijing Medical College in 1983 and her PhD from Harvard Medical School in 1991 through CUSBEA program. After postdoctoral training as a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell postdoctoral fellow at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, MIT, she joined UCLA as an Assistant Professor in 1996 and was appointed a tenured full Professor in 2005. She was the David Geffen Chair Professor and the Director of the Institute for Molecular Medicine before returning to Peking University in 2013. She is now a Chair Professor and the Dean of the School of Life Sciences and a senior investigator of the Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences. Among her numerous honors are the Pew Scholar Award, the Howard Hughes Assistant Investigator Award and the Prostate Cancer Foundation Award. She is a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science and an associate member of EMBO. Wu lab was the first to demonstrate the role of PTEN tumor suppressor in regulating stem cell G0-G1 cell cycle entry, self-renewal, proliferation, survival and in the formation of “cancer stem cells”. Importantly, their work showed that “multi-hit progression” in tumorigenesis is likely to take place at the level of cancer stem cells and these “hits” can be used for stratifying cancers and serve as therapeutic targets.